Closing the gap of the Global South

Closure of Wiki Loves Africa contest

Wiki Loves Africa 2014 was a photographic / media contest that encouraged people from across Africa, and beyond, to celebrate Africa’s diversity and cultural richness through images or videos illustrating the theme “cuisine”. The competition took place between the 1st October and 30th November and was accompanied by focus events in eight countries: Côte d'Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, South Africa, Tunisia, and Uganda. The project was funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and the Orange Foundation.

By the close of the competition, 6,116 images were entered by 873 unique contributors from 49 countries. Countries with the largest number of contributions were Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Tunisia, Uganda, Egypt, Morocco and South Africa. There were local teams on the ground in Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Malawi, South Africa, Tunisia, Algeria and Uganda. These country teams, made of volunteer groups, hosted 27 on-the-ground events that related to the contest. We were also pleased to see enthusiastic response and high participation levels from countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania that did not have local events in those countries. The project was mentioned in national press in these countries.

Gendergap and Belgiumgap

Art+Feminism Brussels Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 2015

On 7 and 8 March an Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon was organised in Brussels. With this edit-a-thon a presentation has been given about Free/Libre and Open Source, about Wikimedia & Wikipedia and about the the gendergap on Wikipedia. During the edit-a-thon articles have been written about the subjects of art and feminism, mostly related to Belgium. Besides the attempt to close the gendergap, the participants also worked on the Belgiumgap: the relative limited number of articles about Belgian subjects.

One day at the radio

Wikipedia Day at Catalunya Ràdio

On 13th of March, from 8am and throughout the day, Amical Wikimedia and Ramon Barnils Group organized an Edit-a-thon at Catalunya Ràdio headquarters, the Catalan public radio station. The event lasted 12 hours with live connections every half an hour. The aim of the initiative was to improve the article of the eminent journalist Ramon Barnils, a founder of Catalunya Ràdio, updating and renewing his entry and other related items. Catalan Wikipedia celebrated its 14th anniversary on the 16th of March, just when it is about to reach 500,000 articles, and the 14th of March was the 14th anniversary of the death of Ramon Barnils. 25 Wikimedians attended (8 new) the edit-a-thon in different turns. All the radio programs of that day were focused on Wikipedia: Wikipedians were interviewed on the factual programmes, the analysis program discussed on the impact of Wikipedia, the comedy show made jokes about Wikipedia, and the game show asked questions about Wikipedia. The Ramon Barnils Group and relatives released photos of the journalist into Wikimedia Commons. The Catalan public TV covered it, too. In addition, Wikipedians improved the Wikidata item and the Wikiquote page of Ramon Barnils, and made a lots of pics and recorded the voice of the journalists of Catalunya Ràdio for Wikimedia Commons. You can find the images here and here.

Catalan Gastronomy media donation

Figueres onions

The Baix Empordà County has released about 500 proffessional images of Catalan traditional food, recipees and ingredients on an open license so they are beeing now uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by our volunteers and used in many articles. On 2014 Amical gave a regular Wikipedia workshop for professionals of the Baix Empordà County. One of the attendees was particullary interested in food documentation, and after some months of conversations, his organisation has decided to open up their content. They are releasing under CC-BY / CC-BY-SA licenses both documents, images and recipees of Catalan representative food of their County. Baix Empordà is the official naming for the world wide known touristic destination brand Costa Brava. Enjoy and reuse the pics here.

A very busy month!

Meeting of GLAM Wiki coordinators and organisers at Wikimedia France in March 2015

Consistent with Europeana’s strategy to deepen its involvement in GLAM-Wiki collaboration and the Wikimedia movement’s desire to emphasise sharing best practices among its local organisations, the GLAM coordinators from Europe’s Wikimedia Chapters were recently invited together for their first ever gathering, facilitated by Europeana and hosted by Wikimédia France. Following the work done by a dedicated Wikimedia-Europeana taskforce in August and January – in which Wikimédia France participated – Europeana and Wikimédia France are extremely happy to support these efforts as they both help to make European cultural heritage more accessible, re-usable and connected. The 15 nations represented at the weekend’s-workshops all have GLAM outreach programs at different stages of development – sometimes coordinated by volunteers, sometimes by staff, sometimes by elected board members – but in all cases benefited from the sharing of experiences and devising of common goals for the forthcoming year. The full minutes and outcomes of the weekend’s workshop are available online. See also blopost here !

Sèvres' partnership still on track

Magot - Pajou, buste de Madame du Barry

Our partnership with the Cité de la Céramique nearby Paris is still on : in March, more photo shooting and video recording took place thanks to the continuous involvement of Lionel Allorge and Coyau.

Two Edit-a-thons on completely new topics!

Wikimédia France's volunteers facilitated 2 edit-a-thons : one with the Musée du quai Branly, embedded in a 2-days event about ethnology and one around women in contemporary arts, following the initiative launched last year through "Art + Feminism". The latter was a real success with more than 150 participants over the week-end.

Wikimedian photographers invited for the opening of a sculpture exhibition

The musée national du Moyen-Âge (aka musée de Cluny) opened its press conference to four Wikimedians - both photographers and non-photographers - and allowed them to witness the exhibition basckstage and talk with the curator in charge of the brand new Sculptures souabes exhibition.

Taking pictures of dead animals : it's a hobby too !

The local group of Rennes aka the "NCO" - Non-Cabale de l'Ouest - organized 3 sessions of photo shooting at Rennes 1 university, in the frame of a partnership agreement signed last October. Slowly but surely, they're developing their skills and making more and more pictures available on Commons from one of the greatest zoology collections in France.

1 topic, 2 talks, 3 hours

1-2-3 Museen - Bundeskunsthalle Bonn

On invitation of Landschaftsverband Rheinland I had a talk in the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn about Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons in GLAM context. ~ 25 employees of various museums and archives in the Rhineland came to hear in 3 hours 2 talks about 1 topic (1-2-3). See my slides for details (sorry, in German only). The second talk was held by Laura Held, head of the library of the Bundeskunsthalle as backview to the Outer Space edit-a-thon in 2014.

Agreements with national cultural institutions and professional associations

ICOM Italia and Wikimedia Italia Agreement

ICOM logo

ICOM Italia, the national section of international Council of Museums, has signed on March 12th a general agreement with Wikimedia Italia that we consider very important because of the prestige of this organization, and because in the last two years Italian GLAM projects were mainly focused on libraries than museums. The agreement, in particular, is about ICOM Italia supporting the Italian edition of Wiki Loves Monuments in the next years, promoting it through its widespread contacts with Italian museums, and jointly organizing cultural events and courses for professionals in the field.

In addition, we reached an agreement on the very important issue of lobbying, togheter with other professional associations, for a better law system regarding digital reproduction and free use of Italian cultural heritage.

ICCU Agreement

At the beginning of March, after a long preliminary work, Wikimedia Italia has signed a framework agreement with the major national institution for libraries in Italy, the Istituto centrale per il catalogo unico delle biblioteche italiane e per le informazioni bibliografiche (ICCU). The Institute, subordinate to Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, supervises the National Libraries System (SBN) and is responsible for cataloguing and digitazation procedures of bibliographic and documentary collections held in public and private Italian libraries.

The first joint project will be an integration of tha major Italian libraries database, the Anagrafe delle biblioteche italiane with Wikipedia, Wikidata, and OpenStreetMap, resulting in updated data about localizations, services, and opening hours of libraries for wiki projects users. The project will possibly continue enriching the Anagrafe with links to historical libraries Wikipedia articles. Other forms of collaborations will be found in the next months with the aim of promoting open access and open culture principles.

Biblioteca Alessandrina on Wikisource

Francesco II della Rovere

On March 10th, Wikimedia Italia has come to an agreement with Alessandrina Academic Library in Rome. Almost 200 ancient digitized books will be uploaded to Wikisource. They are part of 16th century Duke of Urbino Francesco Maria II Della Rovere, collection. After his death, his books were conserved at Pope Alessandro VII library, after wich Alessandrina Library was named. Books donated to Wikisource, from geography to hunting, from falconry to chess and voyages, are in Italian, Latin, and Spanish languages.

BEIC tool for Wikidata imports, official publishers data

BEIC has published more data in CC-0: data about almost a thousand publishers of Lombardy of which APE (operated by BEIC) handles the legal deposit. Data includes name, (structured) address, official website, publishing brand status and most importantly the size (big, mid or small) per the official definition by ISTAT.

Knowing the size of a publisher will help put some order in a very crowded category the Italian Wikipedia has for publishers. The data was not formerly available other than by OPAC mining and screenscraping. Publishers of Lombardy cover over 50% of the national sales of books and BEIC is the only possible source for this data, as the National Statistics Agency (ISTAT) and national book deposit entities (BNCR/BNCF libraries) have a lower coverage of publishers (around 70%) and don't release any data about them.

The CSV import script written for this purpose is designed to be reusable for any kind of import in the future, also by people with little familiarity of Python, JSON etc., by letting the importers do most work in their favorite spreadsheet software. The script will soon be part of the pywikibot library.

Stelline Conference

As every year, Wikimedia Italia participated at the annual convention of librarians in Milan, at Convegno Stelline. Several wikipedians were present, and Andrea Zanni had a talk as president of Wikimedia Italia, entitled "Building communities: digital libraries in the age of Wikipedia" (article and slides of the talk, both in Italian). The convention has been the occasion to network with several librarians, and establish relationship that are leading in the organization and workshops related to Wikipedia in several libraries around Italy.

Assembly of Wikimedia Italia in a library

The annual assembly of Wikimedia Italia has been held at Biblioteca Delfini and Biblioteca Crocetta, two of the main libraries in Modena, Italy. The venues were kindly offered by the council of librarians in Modena, who were present in the first part of the assembly. In fact, Wikimedia Italia presented his work with GLAM related to Wikipedia, Wikisource, OpenStreetMap and Wikidata. Moreover, the head of the Modena libraries and the president of the National Association of Libraries (AIB) spoke during the morning, analyzing possibile convergences between libraries and the Wikimedia movement.

Women's History

Agenzia per l'Italia digitale

AgID, the goverment agency for developing digital policies in Italy, has opened to private and public actors the participation to the National Coalition for Digital Competencies. The Coalition consists of public national and local institutions, business and professionals sector, education and research organizations, trade unions and nonprpfit organizations.

Wikimedia Italia and its president, Andrea Zanni, have been accepted in the Coalition scientific commitee, and will focus its effort in underlying digital rights and freedom issues.

Wiki rides the subway editathon and second edition of the Editatona gender gap marathon

The Laboratorio para la Ciudad agency and the own Sistema de Transporte Colectivo (the official name of Mexico City subway) provided us documents and a dataset with up to date figures of afluency to the system. The Mexico City Metro is the second largest metro system in North America after the New York City Subway. In 2012, the system served 1.609 billion passengers, placing it as the eighth highest ridership in the world. This is the first editathon where Wikimedia Mexico used open government data to enrich the Spanish Wikipedia.

At the end more than 60 articles were edited. In addition, Metro officials and staff attended the event, answering questions about the system to the Wikimedia Mexico editors and we also talked to them about their experiences working in one of the largest metro systems in the world.

The Editatona: Helping women edit Wikipedia in Mexico

Wikimedia Mexico has started a new program called the Editatona (our feminine word for ‘Editathon’ in Spanish): this editing marathon for women aims to increase gender diversity on the Spanish Wikipedia. We have already hosted two Editatonas this year — and plan two more in 2015, with a focus on Latin America and Spanish-speaking Wikimedia organizations.

Our first Editatona took place on January 31, 2015, bringing together 36 women participants who came in-person — and five more who joined online; this Editatona was held in the Instituto de Liderazgo Simone de Beauvoir, an institution devoted to women, gender gap investigations and empowerment workshops. The second Editatona took place on March 14, 2015, gathering 25 women in-person and three more online participants; it was held in Mexico City’s Biblioteca Vasconcelos, the venue for Wikimania 2015 this summer.

Nature, Art, Feminism and a GLAM-WIKI conference

Project Nature will make available more images of damsels and dragonflies

Project Nature

The Museum for Natural History Naturalis has started the search for a Wikipedian in Residence. The volunteers involved in project nature are starting work on processing a content donation by De Vlinderstichting (Butterfly Foundation). Information on and images of the dragonfly species of the Netherlands was released under a Creative Commons licence.

Art and Feminism

Writing about women and art, at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

The Netherlands has actively participated in the worldwide Art+Feminism campaign on 7 and 8 March. We held no less than three edit-a-thons (one at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, one at Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht, one at Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam). A few dedicated volunteers initiated the Art+Feminism Challenge, several stayed home and immersed themselves in an all-weekend editing marathon. March was "Women's History Month" and early results indicate over 600 articles and 150 improved articles worldwide throughout the month of March, and in the Dutch Wikipedia there were 53 articles on women added. There were also many Wikidata items added in the case of new articles not previously existing in any other language. 15 of the Dutch articles were among the new items.

GLAM-WIKI 2015

The GLAM-WIKI 2015 conference takes place April 10-12 in The Hague! A few numbers: at the time of writing this newsletter, we expect to hold 30 sessions at 2 locations (Koninklijke Bibliotheek and Nationaal Archief), more than 100 participants and 30 speakers from 4 continents. At least 400 stroopwafels will be eaten.

Six months in

A Year of Folk Customs with Wikipedia field work

Easter procession, Wilamowice 2015

The team at work

The Year of Folk Customs project - in collaboration with the National Museum of Ethnography - is running. Three mixed teams consisting of Wikipedians, Museum staff and volunteers have travelled over Easter to three countryside locations: Wilamowice, Chobienice and Lednica Górna. Each team recorded the folk customs (Easter processions, Wet Monday variations and other customs) happening in those locations on video, interviewed the residents, photographed the events and asked residents for copies of local press and other texts about local customs and about the locations themselves. Some images have already been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

Over the next 2 months the teams will work on articles related to the customs and visited places. By autumn the project is to include 1k media (images, video, interviews) of 7 customs in Wikimedia Commons and 21 related Wikipedia articles. The project page will soon be available in English.

The Warsaw Rising Museum is planning to begin releasing digitized wartime newspapers published by Polish command in 1944 Warsaw 1944 as PDF files.

3 new projects are currently discussed with museum staff; for the next month, the main focus will however lie on developing the already begun collaborations with State Archive in Lodz, the Warsaw Rising Museum and developing articles related to the ethnographic project - as well as focusing on communicating with Wikipedians and increasing the reuse of new GLAM content in Wikipedia articles.

Women's edit-a-thons, Workshops and Miguel Delibes

Women's edit-a-thons

On March 8 it is celebrated the International Women's Day. There is a gender gap in Wikipedia, in the amount of female editors and also articles about women. For this reason several activities, like edit-a-thons and a writing contest were organized in Spain. There were at least five edit-a-thons in Spain that week-end: Valladolid, organized by Wikimedia España, Biblioteca Reina Sofía of Valladolid University and Asociación Rosa Chacel; Valencia, organized by Wikimedia España, Amical Wikimedia and AMPA of IES Juan de Garay; Madrid, organized by MediaLab Prado; Madrid, organized by Wikimedia España, El Club de las 25 and Fundación Mujeres por África; and Palafrugell, organized by Amical Wikimedia and Arxiu Municipal of Palafrugell. Several libraries and archives were involved in these activities. Wikimedia España also gave support to wikimedians in Bolivia to organize.

A writing contest in Italian, Portuguese and Spanish is organized by Iberocoop, to have more articles about women in these languages. The contest, called La mujer que nunca conociste will end on April 12.

Art+Feminism in Madrid

Participants in Art+Feminism edit-a-thon in Madrid

Edit-a-thon in Valladolid

Participants in edit-a-thon in Valladolid

Workshops at Reina Sofía Library in Valladolid and UNED in Palencia

In March two workshops about Wikipedia were run at Reina Sofía Library of Valladolid University, and two more at UNED in Palencia. There were also some talks in different schools and high schools in Spanish and Catalan: Vall d'Uixó and Valladolid.

Free images of Miguel Delibes

The Fundación Miguel Delibes, as an answer for a request from Wikimedia España, freely shared nine pictures of Miguel Delibes, the famous Spanish writer. These images are now on Wikimedia Commons at this category.

Around 20 participants, both new users, long time Wikipedians and staff from other GLAMs, created or improved more then 30 articles and improved discriptions on Commons and Wikidata after an introduction where curators from Nordiska museet and Armémuseum talked about their collections and Erwin Verbruggen from Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision gave a short presentation of Europeana Fashion.

BARK

As a result of a previous presentationI was invited to the AGM of BARK, an organization dealing with building antiquarian questions and knowledge in the GLAM sector, to talk about Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects. Quality, reliability and how to contribute with images and sources were on the agenda, and after a lot of questions several participants agreed that they would start correcting errors they find in the future instead of complain about it.

CMS coordinators meeting

In the ongoing collaboration between Wikimedia Sweden and the Council of Central Museums all Wikimedia Coordinators were invited to a meeting to both talk about what has been achived so far and to plan for a future when we move from running this as a pilot to include working with the Wikimedia projects in their normal day to day work.

The Tramp will be 100!

One of the things that worked last year was theming events around notable anniversaries, with the aim of improving Wikipedia articles before they get visited by lots of people who want to know what the anniversary is about. There have been a number of suggestions for possible events, and our first this year was about Chaplin's iconic film The Tramp which was released 100 years ago in April. We created a number of new pages and improved some previously created pages. By placing a banner on the talk page these have been indexed here. Although Chaplin lived until 1977, his earlier films are in the public domain, thanks to how US copyright law works. This editathon went well with new editors getting a taste for Wikipedia as we started articles on some of the other early American actors who co-starred in Chaplin's films. Wikimedians also got a chance to go on the Cinema Museum guided tour. During this we learnt exactly why the Cinema Museum was such an appropriate place to mark this centenary. Chaplin had a strong connection to the locality. The Museum is located in the administration block of the former Lambeth Workhouse, where Chaplin stayed as a child. Opposite the Museum is the building where newly arriving men were assessed and deloused, and we can only imagine the impact this had on the formative mind of the young Chaplin and the extent to which it enabled him to create his film persona of The Tramp. This was the second event we have done at the Cinema Museum (See Cinema Museum Back Stage Pass, October 2014) and it has proved to be a very popular venue. As a museum it contains a broad range of artefacts constituting the material culture of the venues where the public gathered to view the burgeoning film industry since it developed in the 1890s. While some of us were creating or developing pages, there was also the opportunity to photograph some of their collection which directly related to Chaplin. Two quotes from our attendees:

"Excellent venue which created lovely sociable atmosphere. I loved the tour and guides."

How likely are you to continue editing Wikipedia? "Very likely. Especially if we can meet at such lovely venues."

On the last day of the month, Andy, who was in Tunisia of the WikiArabia conference (report next time), gave a talk, "Wikipedia and Chemistry - how you can help", to chemistry students at the University of Tunis El Manar, then met with Tunisian members of the RSC, to discuss potential collaboration between them, local Wikipedians, and the society.

Thinktank

Andy Mabbett is also Wikimedian in Residence at Thinktank Museum in Birmingham. An editathon was held there on 7 March, and was attended by Wikipedians from as far away as Manchester and Southampton. Among the articles written were Murray's Hypocycloidal Engine (third oldest working engine in the world - the oldest is also at Thinktank), Woolrich Electrical Generator (the first electrical generator used in an industrial process) and Helen Kerly (one of only two female, civilian, pilots to receive a commendation in World war II). For a more complete list of articles worked on, see the Thinktank project diary.

The upload of donated images continues.

Scotland

Sara Thomas' four month residency secondment to Glasgow Museums has now passed the half way point. After the end of May, she'll be moving to Museums Galleries Scotland to work nationally. The first Wiki working group meeting for curators took place on 24 Feb, where nine curators were trained to edit Wikipedia. The next meeting will take place in early April. Discussions are ongoing with regard to securing an image release. An editathon focusing on Scottish Fairground culture, in association with the Showpeople community, will take place on 7 May at the Riverside Museum. Sign up details are on the event page.

Sara, Ally (Edinburgh), and Jason (Wales) have reached a consensus that the appropriate collective noun for Wikimedians should be "a chaos".

Ballet

Tim Riley led an editathon at the Royal Opera House training a group of students from their student ambassador program. Rachel Beaumont of the Royal Opera House wrote it up as a blogpost.

Wales

Upcoming:

April 10th; at the National Library of Wales: Welsh Photographers Editathon. This event will focus on creating and improving articles about Welsh photographers, their lives, their careers and their photographs. The event ties in with the launch of a major exhibition on the life and work of w:en:Philip Jones Griffiths to be held at The National Library of Wales later this year. The event will be hosted by the Wikipedian in Residence Jason Evans and William Troughton the NLW Visual Images Librarian together with experienced Wikipedians. It will begin at 10am with introductions and training before editing begins!

April 23rd; at the National Library of Wales: WWI Gallipoli Edit-a-thon. Welsh regiments played a huge part in the Gallipoli Campaign. To mark the centenary of the beginning of the campaign on the 25th of April 1915 This event will focus on creating and improving articles about the Welsh regiments involved, the battles, the soldiers and their achievements. The event will be hosted by the Wikipedian in Residence Jason Evans together with experienced Wikipedians. It will begin at 10am with introductions and training before editing begins!

Yorkshire

Art and Feminism Editathon at Wakefield 3

Our highlight in Yorkshire has been the fantastic Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield. The event attracted 19 participants, and led to the creation of 12 new biographies of female artists and the improvement of 14 other articles. The event got coverage in the UK's Independent newspaper and on Leeds Student Radio in their Arts show (including an interview with Pat Hadley).

The collaboration with Harrogate Museums has continued with the training of one of their volunteers in order to set up a partnership with a Wikipedia Editor keen on Egyptology. The discussion of this has been taking place on the Museum's GLAM Directory talk page. Though Harrogate's donation (71 images) is relatively small. Their team have been keen to learn that this should lead to more than a million views on Wikipedia in the next year. An informal post about this Forecast:A million pairs of eyes has been useful for the Harrogate team to feedback to their managers and for encouraging other museums to overcome their hesitations.

Wikipedia in Philadelphia

Represent African American Artists

Charlotte Lowrey, a project assistant at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and John Vick, the organizing curator of PMA's exhibition Represent: 200 Years of African American Art, hosted Represent African American Artists, a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, on March 25, 2015. Charlotte Lowrey suggested the event after seeing the success of Art+Feminism.

Represent was a wonderful exhibition, well worth seeing. The event was ideally located, just down the hall from the exhibit, so that attendees could see the exhibition and choose artists to work on. John Vick and Charlotte Lowrey organized and led the event, providing reference materials about the artists and answering questions about the exhibition. Mary Mark Ockerbloom, Wikipedian in Residence at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, presented a training session for new editors.

Of approximately 50 artists featured in the exhibition, only five or six had substantial entries on Wikipedia before the event, and twenty-seven had no entry at all. Twenty-two people attended the event in person, and others online. They created ten new articles, including Moe Brooker, Margo Humphrey, Odili Donald Odita, Ellen Powell Tiberino, and Allan Randall Freelon. Additional articles were edited. Several of the new articles will be featured as Wikipedia "Did You Knows".